[comp.sys.mac] 7 Meg MacWrite? Zmodem bug?

wilson@ji.Berkeley.EDU (James E. Wilson) (04/18/89)

In article <12486843760008@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu> REEVES-T@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Dusty) writes:
>This is a strange one. I observed an oddity on a Mac SE
>in a public acess pc site here at OSU. The MacWrite program
>on the hard disk was taking up 7 megs of space. I thought

I just looked at my copy of MacWrite, and noticed that it too has been
corrupted.  It turns out that my copy has 56 'STR ' ID=801 resources.
According to the MPW tool RezDet, these resources have sizes ranging
from 0 to over 200 million bytes.  (RezDet also prints out the warning
message "duplicate IDs (801)" 1540 times, that's 56 choose(?) 2 = 56*55/2
times, not very helpful.)  Size my copy of MacWrite is only 394,886 bytes,
there is obviously a lot of incorrect data in the resource file.

I next tried looking at MacWrite with FEdit.  Inside the resource file of
MacWrite I found about 10 binhexed Technotes.  Each technote is a complete
binhex 'file' as downloaded from comp.binaries.mac.  The header of each 
technote starts at a sector boundary, and each technote is padded to a sector
boundary with apparently random bytes.  I say that these are complete
technotes, because I saved one of them to a separate file, and had no problems
unbinexing and unstuffing it.

These files were downloaded to my Mac using Zmodem batch mode, from a UNIX
system running sz.  I suspect that the problem is related to running Zmodem
in the background while MacWrite is in the foreground.  (With The Finder,
Stuffit, and McSink as possible accessories).  I'll have to experiment.

Can anyone explain how this might have happened?

Some relevant info:  5 Meg Mac II with System 6.02, Zmodem 0.75 (although
I may have had an earlier version 0.70(?) when I downloaded those technotes), 
MacWrite 5.0, Multifinder, and lots of inits (including Suitcase).
Incidentally, I, too, have had lots of trouble with the 'shrinking fonts'
of Zmodem.



Jim Wilson                          | And if a man tried to spend his time on 
Internet: wilson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU | earth, to show before he died, what one
Usenet:  ...!ucbvax!ucbernie!wilson | man's life could be worth, yes, I wonder
                                    | what would happen to this world.